Can You Sue for Customer Support Being Slow and Making Mistakes

[kingmo]

Business is based in New York

Long story short our domain name went down because we had an outdated confirmation email there (our fault, although 0 attempt was made to contact any other way). This should however be a very quick thing to resolve (2-3 days at best), what we faced instead is 3-5 day response times for the past 3 weeks from the hosting provider. Support not keeping any track of what previous parties talked about and just repeating the same thing over and over getting nowhere. We're now nearing on a month of downtime in communications, brand damage, and naturally there will be heavy impact on SEO.

Does this qualify as negligence or anything of the sort?

 

[quincy]

Business is based in New York

Long story short our domain name went down because we had an outdated confirmation email there (our fault, although 0 attempt was made to contact any other way). This should however be a very quick thing to resolve (2-3 days at best), what we faced instead is 3-5 day response times for the past 3 weeks from the hosting provider. Support not keeping any track of what previous parties talked about and just repeating the same thing over and over getting nowhere. We're now nearing on a month of downtime in communications, brand damage, and naturally there will be heavy impact on SEO.

Does this qualify as negligence or anything of the sort?

Perhaps you were negligent but I do not see negligence on the part of those attempting to get you back online.

 

[Just Blue]

Px Hx....

 

[quincy]

Px Hx....

Interesting.

 

[kingmo]

Perhaps you were negligent but I do not see negligence on the part of those attempting to get you back online.

In my business if I act irresponsible while attempting to promote a holiday event and delay it so much that all marketing goes to waste i can get sued. Why is this different?

 

[Taxing Matters]

In my business if I act irresponsible while attempting to promote a holiday event and delay it so much that all marketing goes to waste i can get sued. Why is this different?

That would occur because you had a contract with your client that was breached when you failed to deliver what was promised. If you promise in a contract to promote a holiday event by a certain date and fail to do that, it's a breach of contract. It's not a negligence issue. That's because there is no case law that holds a business owes a legal duty to customers to provide good customer service. Rather, customer service matters fall in the realm of contract law — so the issue here would be what, if anything, your contract with the provider says about this kind of customer service issue. Here, it is very likely that your contract with the online provider does not guarantee any particular level of customer service response.

 

[cbg]

I can identify with the poster's frustration and wonder if it's the same site host that took my husband's website and primary email down for over a month because all of a sudden they didn't believe that the email address he'd been using for ten years was really him. Despite the fact that he HAD updated the email address with them, properly, on their forms, at the appropriate time, he had to fax them copies of his identification and fill out their forms three different times and he had to threaten them with legal action before they would believe it was him. As the one who had to send the faxes I know how many times they asked for the same information. It's not easy to run a business for a month with no website and having everything sent to the secondary email.

OP, have an attorney in your state review your contract with the provider with a fine-tooth comb.

 

[quincy]

In my business if I act irresponsible while attempting to promote a holiday event and delay it so much that all marketing goes to waste i can get sued. Why is this different?

You said you had not updated your email so the initial blame falls on you.

The quality of customer service varies substantially from one company to another. It is best to contact one person and insist on speaking to that person, or that person's supervisor, only. Getting shuffled from one customer service person to another causes unnecessary delays.